Happenings in the Wolfsonian-FIU Rare Books and Special Collections Library

Recent Florida International University Class Visits to The Wolfsonian Library

As the spring semester at Florida International University got underway, several professors brought their students to The Wolfsonian museum and research library for presentations on subjects related to their courses.

The first of the university student visits included thirty-two students taking my own history course, America & Movies: The Underbelly of America, 1900s to 1950s. The early arrivals were treated to a brief tour of the fifth floor galleries and a perusal of Hugo Gellert’s mural study, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together, or, The Last Defenses of Capitalism.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Afterwards, the entire class sat down in our auditorium to watch Dangerous Hours (1920), a silent film about the first “Red Scare.”

After critically analyzing the message and film techniques of the movie, the students were taken up to our library to view a display of primary source materials dealing with social problems in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

We began with an examination of a memorial book published soon after President McKinley’s assassination at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York in 1901. Inspired by the fiery speeches of Emma Goldman, a radicalized anarchist by the name of Leon Czolgosz drew out a concealed revolver and shot the president twice while he was shaking hands with the public inside the Temple of Music.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

McKinley died a week later and his body was ceremoniously taken from Buffalo to Washington, and to Canton, Ohio during five days of national mourning. Nine days after the president’s death, his assassin was quickly tried, sentenced to death in the electric chair, and his remains interred in a prison graveyard.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

McKinley’s assassination, the rise of militant unions such as the Wobblies (IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World), and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 triggered a Red Scare panic in America.

The Wolfsonian–FIU

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised Gift

At the height of the first Red Scare (1919-1920), Emma Goldman was among 500 radical aliens and “undesirables” rounded up and deported from the country.

While the 1920s are most often referred to as the “Roaring Twenties,” they were also a time of serious social strife. The trial of Italian immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti began in 1920, and after seven years of retrials and mass demonstrations, ended with their execution on August 23rd, 1927.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

This was also a decade witnessing harsh Jim Crow laws, extreme racial prejudice, and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan carrying out cross-burnings and lynchings to cow “troublesome” Black WWI veterans in the South, and Catholic and Jewish immigrants in northern urban centers. In the Midwest, another white supremacist splinter group known as the Black Legion formed and thrived on growing nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment.

The passage of Prohibition was intended as another Progressive Era check on the culture and influence of what white Anglo-Saxon Protestants perceived as an influx of “hard drinking” Irish and Italian immigrants. Ironically, attempts at enforcement of the ban on alcohol had the unintended consequences of turning millions of Americans into lawbreakers and encouraging the rise of political graft, corruption, and violent gangsters.

The Wolfsonian collection is especially strong in materials documenting the Great Depression and New Deal era, and items displayed for the students covered everything from mass unemployment and urban breadlines to the farming crisis and ecological disaster of the dustbowl.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU library collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Purchased with funds donated by Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

The “Dirty Thirties” became the “heyday” of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), as leftist radicals redoubled their recruitment efforts by pointing to the decade-long depression as proof of the inevitable collapse of the Capitalist system.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU library collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

While President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies put millions of Americans back to work, it was the Second World War that ended the depression by stimulating American production and employment in war industries.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Gift of Leonard A. Lauder

Social and racial tensions persisted, however, with African-Americans, immigrants, and women clamoring for better opportunities and respect, even as immigrants were viewed with suspicion and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were uprooted and sent to internment camps.

While America and the Soviet Union became allies in the common struggle against fascist, Nazi, and Japanese aggression, as soon as the war was won, the old ideological antagonisms reasserted themselves in the Cold War, the Korean conflict, and a second Red Scare.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Promised gift

Not long after my own class visit, FIU Assistant Professor Dan Royles brought the graduate students in his History, Memory, and the Public class to The Wolfsonian library to review some materials on the theme of race and memory. The professor and his students had the opportunity to peruse several primary resource materials regarding the African-American experience in the 1920s; some promoting racist stereotypes, others celebrating the cultural contributions of the “New Negro” and the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU Library Collection

The students were also quizzed about their knowledge of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American youths unjustly accused of raping two white girls and subjected to a sham trial in Alabama. The CPUSA took up their legal defense, secured them a retrial, took their case to the Supreme Court, and also organized mass demonstrations across the globe on their behalf in a manner reminiscent of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial of the 1920s. The plight of the Scottsboro Boys was memorialized in pamphlets, magazines, and an unpublished linocut manuscript produced by the CPUSA.

The Wolfsonian–FIU Library Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. loan

The Wolfsonian–FIU Library Collection

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

The Scottsboro propaganda materials were part of the CPUSA’s larger strategy for recruiting African-Americans to the Communist cause.

Gellert also illustrated the dust jacket of a booklet of “Negro Songs of Protest”—plantation, lumber camp, and chain gang music collected by his brother Lawrence and arranged for voice and piano by Elie Siegmaister.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Other left-leaning and socially-conscious artists of the period also used their artwork to push for civil rights and an anti-lynching law. Lynd Ward, an American Socialist, used the wood-engraving technique to produce numerous graphic novels in the 1930s, one of which captured the horrors of a lynching.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In the same period, the famous designer John Vassos also attacked lynching in his art deco illustrated book, Humanities.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Our last set of university student visitors came to The Wolfsonian library earlier this month with Professor Ebru Ozer. Her class is interested in the US1 and Miami Metrorail and are studying themes such as mobility, highway construction, speed, railways, transportation technology, etc.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Naturally, Professor Ozer was interested in having her students see what we had relating to the construction of roadways and railways both in the United States and abroad.

Road-building and other labor-intensive infrastructure projects were particularly popular in democratic and totalitarian countries as a means of employing engineers and construction workers during the depression decade. At the same time that President Roosevelt was spending tax dollars on U.S. One and other road and highway projects, Adolf Hitler was promoting the building of the Autobahn in Nazi Germany.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

A number of the students participating in these visits have already scheduled appointments to return to do further research, and we look forward to their and other student visits this semester.